£11.95
Patrick Hamilton was, in Keith Waterhouse's words, 'A riveting dissector of English life.' He was also a man of great contradictions, as Nigel Jones convincingly shows, through the full access he had to Hamilton's own letters and notes.
Despite a privileged background, Hamilton turned increasingly inward in frustration and bitterness. And despite early success, both critical and material, he suffered under all-consuming obsessions and the almost lifelong addiction to alcohol that caused his early death. He cultivated the persona of the debonaire man-about-town, and yet was drawn to London's murky underside, both as subject matter and in his own life. He remains a complex and intriguing figure, and is brought vividly to life in Nigel Jones's definitive biography.
Nigel Jones is author of The War Walk (1984), Hitler's Heralds: the story of the Freikorps (1987), Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (1999), a brief biography of Britain's Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assassinate Hitler (2009). Nigel has worked for the BBC and independent radio, the Financial Times and Spectator. He was deputy editor of History Today and BBC History magazines. He has fronted BBC TV and radio documentaries on Patrick Hamilton, the First World War and the rise of the Nazis. He conducts the author interviews for the Daily Mail Book Club, and reviews books regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and the Literary Review. He lives in Sussex with his partner and three children.
Revealing and Fascinating... A graphic account of Hamilton's life and convincingly shows how the life found its way into the fiction - Sunday Telegraph
Absorbing - London Review of Books
Replete with descriptive accounts of the novels and plays‚a very readable biography of a writer whose work [is] interestingly implicated‚in the social and psychological crises which beset English bourgeois society in its day - Observer
Full of psychological insights and his literary judgement is sound - Spectator
